Smoke and Mirrors (15 page)

“You shouldn't go into the ballroom,” Stephen muttered. “There's too many of them in the ballroom.”

“Too many what?” Tony demanded. Amy and Zev turned to stare at him. “Never mind. You guys get out of here, I'll get the others.”

He'd gone up only half a dozen steps when the girls started down from the second floor dragging Everett behind them.

“We're going to get a facial in the trailer! ” Ashley announced when she saw Tony.

“No, no!” Everett protested, struggling to keep up. “I said you needed to wash your faces!”

“Facials!” Brianna shrieked.

Tony got out of their way. If nothing else, the girls would be out by sunset. The girls and Everett. And Zev and Amy. Except Zev and Amy were still standing in the hall! He made a shooing motion toward the door and continued upstairs, pushing past the grinning grip carrying Everett's makeup case.

How many people were still up there? Peter, Tina, Adam, Mouse, Kate, Sorge, Mason, Lee—and Brenda. Given the problems with the lamps, at least one electrician. Chris, the gaffer, had gone out to the truck to check his extra lights and Tony hadn't seen him come back in. One grip following the girls and Everett. Maybe one or two still up there. Hartley Skenski, the boom operator, and a sound tech—there'd been more of the sound crew around before lunch when they'd been dealing with the extras, but Tony could only remember seeing the one by the bathroom. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. Under the circumstances, he'd rather it wasn't thirteen. He really didn't need anything that could be interpreted as an omen.

“I'm not going out there! It's raining and I'll get wet!”

Ashley's voice pulled Tony around. Both girls, Everett, and the grip were standing just inside the closed outer door staring out through the beveled glass into the twilight. Zev and Amy were standing just inside the open inner doors. It was dark enough outside that Tony could see all six reflections. At least there were only six. That was good, right?

Except they were supposed to be outside by now!

“You're running out of time.”

“You know, Stephen, your sister's right.” Shoulders against the wallpaper, he slid past the ghost and started back downstairs. “You're not fucking helping!”

He'd just stepped off the bottom step when he felt a sudden chill. The air grew heavy and still. The sounds of talking and laughter and cables being dragged along the upstairs hall became distant—wrapped in cotton. No. Given the way the temperature had plunged, wrapped in ice.

“You're too late,” Stephen murmured.

Tony snorted. “
Quel
surprise.”

A door slammed.

And then another.

And another.

And another.

The sound of the front door slamming echoed through the foyer and as the echoes died, the world snapped back into place.

“The front door was already closed,” Tony said to Cassie as he charged past.

She shrugged. “So were all the others.”

The girls, actually looking a little scared, had backed into the hall with the grip.

Everett reached for the door handle.

Tony couldn't see his reflection in the glass. Nor could he see the porch, or the rain, or anything at all. It was as if the world had gone from dusk to dark in a heartbeat.

“Everett! Don't . . . !”

Too late. The makeup artist grabbed the handle, turned it, shook it, kicked the base of the door, and then turned back toward his audience. “It's locked. Or jammed.”

The inner doors slammed shut, the blackout curtain billowing out into the foyer like a cliché villain's cloak.

It turned out the inner doors were also locked. Or jammed. Or held closed by the evil within the house grown more powerful with the setting of the sun—but Tony figured now was not the time to mention that.

Trapped between the inner and outer doors, Everett pushed while Tony pulled. Nothing.

“What the hell is going on down here?” Peter's voice drew everyone's attention around to the stairs. Tony started to do a quick head count.
. . . eleven, twelve, thirteen . . .

Which was when the lights went out.

“I guess I should have mentioned that was likely to happen,” Cassie murmured under the high-pitched screams of the boss' daughters.

The caretaker's hand stopped about ten centimeters from the kitchen door, his fingers stubbing up against an invisible barrier.

“That's not good.” He glanced down at the black cat. “Yep, you were right. I'm sorry I doubted you.”

Fortunately, Tina had a small flashlight in her purse and Hartley remembered seeing candles in a drawer in the kitchen.

“What the hell were you doing going through the drawers? Never mind,” Peter continued before Hartley could answer. “I don't really care. Go with Tina and bring the candles back here. Everyone else, stay right where you are. We don't need to spend the rest of the night searching for someone who's wandered off in the dark.”

The dark seemed a lot, well, darker after the small cone of light from the flashlight disappeared through the dining room.

“My cell phone isn't working.” Amy's voice.

“Neither is mine.” And Zev's.

After the incident in episode five, CB's announcement about cell phones on set had been succinct.
“Next one I find, I implant.”
Afraid to find out just
where,
the entire crew had stopped carrying their phones although Tony was willing to bet that every backpack or bag in the AD's office held one. And that none of them would work.

He jumped about two feet straight up when a small hand grabbed his T-shirt.

“I don't like this!”

“Don't worry.” Trying not to hyperventilate, he pried the fabric out of Brianna's grip and wrapped her fingers in his. “It'll be all right.”

“No, it won't.” Stephen drifted into his line of sight, looking for the first time translucent and traditionally ghostlike. “It'll be bad. And then it'll get worse.”

“It's probably just a shift in air pressure.” Adam's voice came from about halfway up the stairs. “One of the back doors blew shut.”

“The back doors have been shut all day.” That had to be Kate, Mouse's second, because it wasn't Tina or Amy or Brenda, the only other women in the house.
Other
live
women,
he corrected silently, wishing he'd taken the time to learn the Wizard's Lamp spell instead of the showier Come to Me.

“Then one of them blew open and the storm took the power out.”

“Power in this house sucks.” Given content, probably the electrician.

“The power in this house is ga . . . Ow! Zev! What was that for?” Definitely Amy. “All I was going to say was that the power is gathering!”

“She's right.” Cassie joined her brother. “She's guessing, but she's right.”

Zev's voice sounded like it was coming through clenched teeth. “Let's try not to scare the G. I. R. L. S.”

“We're not deaf.” Ashley. No mistaking the nearly teenage snort.

“And we can spell.” Brianna sounded better than she had, but her hand remained in Tony's. “And our father's not going to like this!”

No one argued.

“And,” she declared triumphantly, “I can hear that baby again.”

So could Tony; not screaming this time, but crying. A thin, sad, barely audible sound that drifted down from the upper hall.

Both ghosts turned toward the stairs.

“Karl,” said Cassie.

“He's just getting warmed up,” Stephen added. Then he glanced at Tony and grinned. “Get it? Warmed up?”

Impossible not to snicker.

“Something funny, Mr. Foster?”

Peter knows my snicker?
Now that was disturbing. “Uh, no.”

“Too bad, I'm sure we could all use a chuckle. Adam, try to raise Hartley.”

“Can't. My battery's dead.”

“I thought you just changed it.”

“I did.”

“They'll be all right,” Cassie murmured reassuringly. “As long as they go straight to the kitchen and straight back. It's still early.”

“And later?” Tony asked, pitching his voice under the argument going on at the stairs.

“Later . . .”

She paused for long enough that her brother answered. “Later, no one's going to be all right.”

“Well, thanks a whole fucking lot for that observation.”

Brianna's fingers tightened around Tony's hand, and her small body bumped hard against his hip. “Thanks a whole fucking lot for what observation?”

“Brianna!” Ashley's protest gave Tony a short reprieve. “I'm telling Mom you said fucking!”

“So did you!”

“Did not!”

“Just did, Zitface!”

Other conversations were beginning to quiet as the girls' volume rose. Any minute now Peter was going to demand to know what was going on and Brianna would tell him and then Tony would have to explain why he'd said what he'd said and to who. To whom?
Oh, yeah, grammar and the dead. Let's make sure we get
that
right. . . .
He could almost hear Peter gathering up his authority. And then he saw salvation: “There's a light in the dinning room!”

Tina's flashlight.

Hartley emerged out of the darkness carrying a full box of white emergency candles. “I got no way to light them,” he said as he reached the hall. “I stopped smoking five years ago now.”

Kate hadn't smoked for two, Mouse for almost seven, and Adam for going on six months.

“Oh, for crying out loud.” Mason's distinctive tones. He came the rest of the way down the stairs and thrust his hand, holding his lighter, into the narrow cone of illumination. His fingers gripped the blue translucent plastic in a way that dared his audience to comment. No one took the dare. Right at the moment, no one cared if Mason smoked and lied about it. Right at the moment, no one would have cared if Mason set fire to bus shelters and lied about that.

They lit six of the twenty-four candles. Six created a large enough circle of light for comfort but not enough flame to be a fire hazard.

“A fire hazard?” Mason snorted. “It's a twenty-foot ceiling, Peter. What the hell are we going to ignite?”

“This place is rented, and we're going to be careful.” The director shut the box on the remaining candles and tucked it under one arm, so pointedly not mentioning the possibility of needing the other eighteen later that everyone heard it.

“Be careful, girls.” Brenda motioned Ashley back as she moved in toward a candle. “Keep your clothes away from the flame; we can't afford to replace them.”

“Not to mention,” Sorge pointed out dryly, “it is a bad thing to have children catch on fire.”

Brenda shot him a look that might have done damage given enough light for him to catch the full impact. “That's what I meant.”

“I never doubted it.”

The baby, Karl, continued crying. Tony glanced up the stairs, wondering if the sound had gotten louder, and realized that Lee was watching him, frowning slightly. Their eyes met and just for an instant, Tony thought he saw . . .

“Everett's lying down!”

And whatever it was, it was gone.

He spun around. Brianna pulled down the blackout curtain and was shining Tina's flashlight between the doors. The beam showed Everett lying on his back, head canted up against the baseboard on the west wall, left arm stretched out, right hand clutching his golf shirt right over the little polo player. “Oh, great! He's had a fucking heart attack!”

“You said fucking.”